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Message From the President

Something Approaching a Parable

The
Colonial Williamsburg Foundation's mission is to tell the story of how
the idea of America emerged in one eighteenth-century capital. Our goal
is to provide for tomorrow, as well as for today, a deeper understanding
of the courage, perseverance, and intellect required to reject crown and
country and give birth to a new nation.

Parts of that story are told by this journal. Parts of it are told
through our distance learning programs, and in our teacher institutes.
But the Historic Area is the place where we pull the threads of Williamsburg
history together in a tapestry of the life and culture of an eighteenth-century
town. It provides a context in which to appreciate how Patrick Henry
and Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and George Washington, and all their
daring colleagues put Virginia and the nation on a bold and uncertain
course toward freedom and independence.

From the day more than seventy-five years ago when Williamsburg's restoration
began, the foundation's aim has been to preserve not just the buildings
but a community-a community of memorable men and women, of philosophies
and ways of living, of belief and experience.

Our purpose was related as well as anywhere on the front page of the
local newspaper, the Virginia Gazette, in a winter interview
with master boot and shoemaker, D. A. Saguto. Historic trades are an
essential part of our educational program; people are fascinated by
tasks performed by hand, and Saguto is among the few craftsmen in the
world who still fashion footwear entirely by hand. He practices eighteenth-century
techniques and skills in a small Duke of Gloucester Street shop. More
important to him, however, is passing those techniques, those skills,
his art, on to his apprentices. Saguto, you see, creates more than shoes,
he creates shoemakers, new heirs of their colonial counterparts.

In microcosm, that is what Colonial Williamsburg is about. It does
more than preserve the past; in a manner more comprehensive, more tangible,
more immediate than at any other museum, it maintains a living legacy.

Let me share with you a letter that vividly makes the point, something
from journal reader Eunice R. Campbell of Andover, Massachusetts-no
relation. A Writing Group member at the Andover Senior Center, she penned
for her friends and shared with our magazine a story approaching a parable.

Strolling the Historic Area one damp, dreary morning with her daughter
Nancy and her son-in-law Frank, she came upon "a quite ordinary young
man in his late twenties, and a small lad, about six, presumably his
son. The father was attempting to find a dry spot for the two of them
on one of the rain-soaked wooden benches that line the street. There
was nothing unusual about their appearance, nothing to alert me to the
fact that I would remember them from that day to this.

"By the time we reached them, both father and son had settled. Paying
no attention whatsoever to the people passing, the father was reading
to the child. Our steps slowed as we heard the text: ïWe hold these
truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. . . .' Though
I wanted to stop and listen, I realized that I could not intrude upon
such an important moment."

Ms. Campbell doubts the boy's memory of that morning will endure, but
she is certain his father's will, and someday he will tell his son "about
the day they shared a wet wooden bench on the Duke of Gloucester Street
in Williamsburg, Virginia, while he read him the Declaration of Independence.

"Why am I so sure?" Because, she writes,"I remember."

Our mission, our goal, our purpose, is distilled in the shoemaker's
shop, and in Ms. Campbell's anecdote, and in our motto: "That the future
may learn from the past."